A voice communication service is one of the most fundamental, ubiquitous, and reliable application in various public communication networks, including landline and wireless communication networks. Source compression engines within wireless cellular networks, namely digital audio and voice codec, enable a bandwidth efficient and reliable means for digital voice communications. Typically, a two-way digital voice pathway is established in such digital voice communications that is an ideal transmission media for secure and bandwidth efficient data communications over the voice pathway.
Given limited bandwidths in a communication system, the voice channels will always take precedence over data channels and are given the highest priority with guaranteed performance on voice related services. On the other hand, current data services using data channels or voice channels, e.g., short message service (“SMS”), do not have guaranteed connections, data speeds, real-time delivery, or success of delivery, among many other quality-of-service (“QoS”) factors. Under a heavy load or overloaded network conditions, the communication system automatically redistributes its resources to ensure the quality of voice-related service over voice channels. Under certain other conditions where the SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) is low or handover is not smooth, only voice service is kept as the data service over the network will be interrupted or even completely dropped. This poses reliability and security issues with today's communication systems and applications. It is even more pronounced in the mobile-health, mobile-banking/commerce, mobile safety, and data streaming applications, where reliable and secure data transmission are needed most.
For instance with mobile-health application, personal data may be exposed to at least one wireless data communications network along the data path while being uploaded. The personal data can be intercepted along the data path and used by a third party (e.g., a criminal) since the data path is not entirely secure. Furthermore, the personal data is not guaranteed on-time nor guaranteed for successful delivery to its destination, which leaves doctors with incomplete or incorrect medical data of their patients. This raises serious reliability and security concerns for both the service providers and the subscribers.
For mobile-banking/commerce applications, confirmation on timely and secure transaction information is paramount. Any failure along the data path in the data communications network will greatly decrease and hinder banking transactions. Furthermore, reliable and secure communication is also paramount in exchanging real time information between a mobile unit and service providers. However, any lack of data network access will hinder any surveillance, monitoring, and remote access of such safety applications.
Therefore, there exists a need for providing a new secure and robust communications system and devices that can transmit data over a more prioritized communication path (e.g., a voice channel), which is more reliable and secure than solely transmitting over a data channel. There exists a need where portions of sensitive data are routed through different communications path (e.g., a data channel and a voice channel), such that retrieving the sensitive data would require data from all the communications paths. Additionally, there exists a need such that sensitive data can be sent either as redundant transmission or as the only transmission through a voice channel, as in on-demand packets or streamed data.